skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How Dennis Ritchie's love of simplicity fueled everything that now matters in computing, including the operating systems and software Steve Jobs used to "fuel a design revolution".

Apple makes beautiful hardware, but does that amount to simplicity? If the focus is Apple software, maybe in 1977 it was simple, but today it is anything but simple. Restrictive? Yes. Simple? No.

When I want simplicity in software I look to New Jersey, not Cupertino.
FYI, I use the data from electoral-vote.com to turn it into a probability of winning the election at http://prespredict.com
Yes, but only if you also ignore the scientific consensus on genetically modified food, vaccines, nuclear energy, and hydraulic fracking :)
Can we please get over the (entirely reasonable) hurt feelings about Ritchie not getting the attention Jobs did?

Jobs certainly made a lot of contributions to his field, even if they were in a different area than Ritchie, and it doesn't advance the discourse to constantly yell "BUT THIS OTHER GUY!" whenever someone is memorializing Jobs.
The Forgotten Half Of Social — Jack Krawczyk
I've never heard this argument before.

Why was Microsoft owning the desktop and browser market so fundamental to the US economy?
This is what HN is becoming, CSS playing cards on the front page. (sigh)
If I will be small and troll persist - I will close and open new company.

If I will be big and troll persist - I move all operations out of USA except office with sales people working on a contract.

What troll get from this - nothing. What USA get from this - negative tax income. What will change for me - employer.
His methodology seems to be "ignore any poll that is bad for Republicans".
Pow is great - except when you need to fall back on debugging multiple apps. Even with powder it's flaky at best.
I noticed a possible issue with the code generation, which may cause the issues with excessive heap allocation that were reported:

var code = 'return {\n';
columns.forEach(function(column) {
code += '"' + column.name + '":' + 'parser.readColumnValue(),\n';
});
code += '};\n';
var parseRow = new Function('columns', 'parser', code);

Instead of performing so many appends to a single string, I would try using map() and then join() the resulting strings:

var code = ['return {\n',
columns.map(function(column) {
return '"' + column.name + '":' + 'parser.readColumnValue(),\n';
}).join(''),
'};\n'].join('');

var parseRow = new Function('columns', 'parser', code);

Of course, this depends on how often the parseRow function is created...
That's odd, Blizzard should be competent enough to revoke the certificates of former GMs (and have per-user certs, not shared ones).
Jobs' death was really amazingly well-timed. He died just at the moment when the open communication culture he helped build was taking off. So his death (and in particular the response) reflects his life's work most remarkably. For the first time in history, the death of a "great man" became almost instantly the subject of debate and analysis, conducted in thousands and thousands of blog posts, hundreds of thousands of comments, tweets and Facebook posts. The debate quickly became recursive - articles about "Why Steve Jobs was great" generate articles about "Why we talk about Steve Jobs" which in turn generates response (such as this), "Why we talk about talking about Steve Jobs." And so on. Only a year later and people are fervently discussing his legacy - having arguments in real time yet saturated with self-consciousness of history. And such discussion in itself changes the object being discussed.
Previous submission of canonical URL 3 days ago (several upvotes, no comments):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4612485
Sony stores, of course, way predate Apple stores. [I first saw them in the '80s, but who knows...]

Sony's a bit lost these days (post playstation, the death of founder Akio Morita, and their move into "content"), but back in the day Sony stores were everything that Apple stores are today: Cool and laid-back, located in the most fashionable part of town, with a spare stylish vibe and spare stylish products, intended as much to set a tone as to sell stuff.

Indeed I would not be surprised if Sony stores were the original model for Apple stores.
anyone know what that background tune is?
Content Marketing Guy Nets 2.7 Million Pageviews in Reddit Experiment
> I get it, I’ve talked to people inside the SEC who want to do a better job but feel like they aren’t being given the power to.

She has a nice rant, but completely missed the point: The SEC is made of people, all of whom are in finance, and most of whom would like a high-paying job on wall-street.

The term "regulatory capture" needs to appear in there somewhere.
Penn students build Firefly to make co-browsing drop-dead easy
That is true of most team based activities. I think the difference with online games is kind of like working from home. Other people living with you may expect you to be present whereas really what you are doing is similar to being on a sports team. No one expects you to be present to do other things while out on the sporting field in the middle of a match.

Granted the time invested is likely a little different.
Lead Engineer: We’re transforming the world of 3D printing. Join us.
Who we are
We believe that 3D printing will fundamentally reshape our relationship with the products and items we use.

Driven by the growing usage of 3D printing services and consumer 3D printers, dreamforge is building the software for this next revolution. (Read more about our beliefs here: http://dreamforge.me/beliefs.html )

We have some solid chops from previous successful startups, are a YCombinator Summer 2012 graduate and are advised by a brilliant professor at Stanford - but mostly, we’re insanely passionate about what we’re building and how important our work is to enabling what the press calls the ‘Third Industrial Revolution.’

What We’re Looking For
We’re looking for a lead, full stack engineer. Even though our focus so far has been on Node.JS and Ruby on Rails, we know smart and driven engineers can pick up any language/framework. Experience is outweighed by passion, hard work, and good judgment.

You’ll be treated like a founder: this means you will have a critical voice in all our decisions and will help us build the team. You should have a relentless focus on getting things done, an unwillingness to pass the buck, an ability to juggle many tasks and roles, and a strong bias to move fast - even if it means breaking things. We have plenty of work - and are looking for someone with an eagerness to dive in.

What We Offer
Come work in a brand new field where you can say from the start (and hopefully often) that you’re making a positive ding in the universe. If that’s not enough:
- Make all core decisions related to engineering as the first full time engineer
- Work on the latest technologies (Node.Js, WebGL, HTML5, Ruby on Rails) and some classics (C++)
- Push the envelope on usability for the entire 3D field, with a brilliant group of computer scientists who do this for a living
- Help implement cutting edge graphical algorithms
- Push to production every day
- Your favorite beer stocked up every week + a true startup hacker office/house
- Competitive compensation

To apply, send an email to jobs@dreamforge.me with a link to your GitHub profile and a project you’re proud to show off. Resumes also accepted.
Windows 8 & Upgrade : What happened to my apps?
Ask HN: Help me find a domain for my weekend project? (fitness related)
Hi,

Two days ago, as I was wondering for the n-th time why I don't go to the gym as often as I wished, I stumbled upon an article providing 16 tips (http://zenhabits.net/get-off-your-butt-16-ways-to-get-motivated-when-youre-in-a-slump) to get motivated and reach those type of goals.

Based on that read, I decided to create a service which provides you with most of the tips. It's a "virtual coach" that emails (spam?) me every few hours asking whether or not you worked out yet. If you did, write a simple log of my workout. If not, you'll get another email a bit later in the day to remind you again. Along with every email comes a new motivational quote. Finally, every time I post my workout, it becomes publicly available to my facebook friends also using the service. Similarly, I can see when my friends keep their promises.

Now that the site is "almost" ready with the most basic set of features I wanted, it's time to come up with a name for it. But I can't think of anything satisfying which is not already registred. Any suggestions?

Also, if you'd like to check out the service (in development), here it is: http://stormy-shelf-5900.herokuapp.com/ - Remember, it's still under development and very rough (started 2 days ago). Any feedback about the site is welcome too. Thanks!
And not a single word about DTrace?
Serious question -- in the past, when NASA wanted to launch a rocket, they would contract with a commercial company such as Lockheed, Douglass, or some similar. Now they contract with companies such as SpaceX. Why is this considered a commercial / private space launch, but the others in the past were considered government funded? NASA is paying for the launches in either case. Or is it the level of involvement and control that NASA has in this case?
http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-w...
> try to guess where the most dangerous place is for the average person in modern times. Ready? The bedroom. And if you're married, the danger is much higher

Protip: when your wife is in the bathroom, unload the pistol under her pillow.
Exactly my point. I'm as nerdy as they come, but this conversation never leads anywhere interesting.
My first computer was a Brainiac kit. My next ones were an IBM 7094 and a Bendix G15. And I still remember keypunching 1401 machine language in my first computer job. And now I'm studying neural networks and Scala: what a trip.
I even had a typewriter[1], but I was a quite old-fashioned kid.

[1] Typewriter: combination of a thick keyboard and a printer without cable (but no bluetooth also). In order to print a letter you had to press a key. For every single letter! The best part was that I never had to charge the battery. The lack of copy & paste was a bit annoying though.
How about you stop calling "C" a low level language?
Read Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100".

Is that intended as a recommendation of a scientific source about long-term trends cross-culturally? I got a big volume of the collected "future history" stories by Robert Heinlein out of the library a year ago, and I was disappointed by how poorly those stories have aged. I also figured out, by rereading Heinlein (a favorite author of mine when I was a kid) that he never informed any of his stories with much perspective from non-Western cultures (although I give him credit for being aware of that kind of issue). Since I spent three years in the 1980s and later another three years spanning the turn of the last century living in a non-Western country, I don't turn to Western science-fiction stories anymore for my social commentary. I like to read real science based on verifiable history to puzzle out social trends. I can recommend a source

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...

and invite other readers here to recommend other sources. I'm not worried about fundamentalist religion "getting control" of science.
OSX font rendering is optimized for high ppi displays (128+ ppi). If you try to look at screenshots of OSX font rendering on low-ppi displays (i.e. typical Windows laptop with 15" display at 1366 x 768) it's going to look incredibly fuzzy.

On the other hand, ClearType is optimized for low-ppi displays. If you try to view text rendered with ClearType on a high ppi display (128+ ppi) it will look incredibly thin because ClearType attempts to force straight font lines into a single row or column of pixels which is incredibly thin at such a high ppi. That's the very thing that makes ClearType fonts look much crisper on very low ppi displays.

tl;dr OSX font rendering is much more readable on 128+ (or even 220) ppi displays.
31 years old. I've been using stand up desk for more than a year and half now after succumbing to a lower back pain and having to sleep on the floor for more than a month to get at least some sleep during the night. It worked for me. For the past 3 years I continued working a lot of hours at a computer (my side project, my main work, and sometimes some consulting work for clients).

I don't stand 100% all the time though. It is more like, somedays I sit more, somedays I stand more. I believe the key here is listening to your body and ability to easily change the position accordingly (sometimes I feel like standing, other times like sitting).
Is this supposed to work on iPad? It taunts me with the promise of a QuickTime-looking play button, which unfortunately doesn't actually do anything when I press it.
(http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~fuh/fcourse/norton4/paper/Got%20...)

> It is based on the world's smallest implementation of a TCP/IP stack -- which is implmented on a small 8-pin low-power microcontroller .. using a mere 512 words of program ROM. If IPic can fit in a PIC, it can fit in just about anything.

> The TCP/IP code itself fits in about 256 bytes (12-bit), and the rest is some extra salt-and-pepper and miscellaneous code.

> The chip is a PIC 12C509A, running at 4MHz (Internal RC clock).

> implementing the IPic tiny TCP/IP stack,

> a HTTP 1.0 compliant web-server,

> a simple telnet server (for editing files on the chip),

> an 24LC256 i2c EEPROM

I think someone has done something smaller by now.

--- EDIT

Here are some other tiny devices.

(http://d116.com/ace/) - "the webACE: a Fairchild ACE1101MT8 microcontroller programmed as a Web server and containing two tiny web pages in its on-chip memory. Since the ACE1101MT8 is the smallest available microcontroller, I believe that this really is the World's Smallest Web Server."

(http://www.magic-1.org/) big, but home built CPU. "This web page is being served by a completely home-built computer: Bill Buzbee's Magic-1 HomebrewCPU. Magic-1 doesn't use an off-the-shelf CPU. Instead, its custom CPU is built out of ~200 74 series TTL chips."

(http://kl.net/atari/) no longer serving pages, this was a web server on an Atari 800
SQLAlchemy has had a PG ARRAY type for a few years, and 0.8 now has full expression support including the ability to use regular Python array indexes and slices:

select([mytable.c.data[5], mytable.c.data[2:7]])

as well as array literals in expressions:

stmt = select([
array([1,2]) + array([3,4,5])
])

We'll soon be adding hstore (and JSON) to tip as well, right now hstore is available as a separate extension:

https://bitbucket.org/audriusk/hstore/src/e0b4f7987ebe/examp...
I upvoted your response because on one hand I do think you are correct in all of what you are saying.

But your previous post can be interpreted as an implication that the people themselves are neither smart, nor wise. A somewhat harsh attack. I re-read it with more emphasis on the "here" part of the sentence and it sounded a bit more as though you are saying that in this instance the people were not wise.

Pointing out incompetence is helpful, but it's also very useful to do so in a way that attempts to minimize the chance of an extremely negative interpretation.
This article comes from the assumption that the goal of the SEC is to stop the industry from doing Bad Things.

That is wrong. The goal of the SEC is to provide a veneer of regulation while ensuring current members that they will have a profitable future in the financial industry.

If you get rid of the SEC and replace it with something, this does not improve. Either you wind up with nobody watching these companies - and hence not even a pretense of regulation - or else you will recreate the incentives that lead to the SEC being broken in the way that it currently is.

Regulatory capture is an intrinsically hard problem. Anything you do about it is bound to fail in time. However what is most likely to work in my opinion is for someone else - for instance the FBI, to investigate current and past members of the SEC for evidence of corruption. Then have a high profile lawsuit.

Once jail time is added to the list of incentives for people in the SEC, we might see more meaningful enforcement from them.
I'm surprised that there isn't a league table of tiny web servers out there on the Internet. Surely there's a subculture out there who are crazy enough to make a hobby of eking the last little bit of performance out of a Z80, 6800 or 6502? Tightly optimised assembly loops and hand crafted packets competing for the glory of surviving for the longest under a Slashdotting...
But apart from educational purposes, why would you do that? Sure, the graphics driver is an ugly blob, but if you care that much about libre hardware/software, it would be odd buying an Raspberry Pi in the first place.

Granted, "for educational reasons" is a valid subject for the Pi. Get that old Abrash book out and let the OpenGL-spoiled kids feel the pain.
Try the NASA TV feed.
I'll just leave this here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FasterThanCee
There's a Livestream app you can get which I assume would let you watch this.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/livestream/id379623629?mt=8
CCL actually has a lot of hair around bootstrapping, to the point that making certain changes to CCL on existing systems is non-trivial, according to Gary Byers: http://clozure.com/pipermail/openmcl-devel/2012-August/01373...

I have heard that Scheme48 has a good story when it comes to portability and Lisp-implementation-written-in-Lisp, but I haven't looked at it.
My understanding (I may be mistaken) is that the level of involvement and control in the two cases is different. SpaceX runs their own mission control for their launches, and the amount of NASA involvement in creation of the vehicles is different (from what I understand). As an example, the Space Shuttle was built by Boeing, but was operated by NASA. von Braun's crowning achievement at NASA, the Saturn V rocket (about as pure a "NASA" rocket as you normally think of) was built by Douglas/Boeing/etc.

Beyond that, the interesting bit I think is the difference in the contracts that SpaceX has, and the contracts that have traditionally been given to space contractors. Traditionally overruns would be covered by government funding, but in the case of SpaceX they eat their own overruns. The result of this seemingly minor change in funding is that they are far less "quasi-government" than space contractors traditionally have been.
I just wish it'd stop repeating.
No, but it is SUPER annoying after the 25th or so repetition.

I'd mute it except that I want to keep the thing open in another browser tab so I can switch to it when the show starts.

Lesson learned: don't use repetitive audio crap while waiting for a web cast to start. Just have silence, then start talking when it's actually starting.
I think the main difference is that the launch is made using a commercial launch vehicle/capsule. If you had the money, you could hand Space X a ball of metal and a pile of cash and they will put it in orbit for you. Just because the government is the first paying customer doesn't mean it isn't commercial.
At the same time, I think it's worth noting that a disturbing amount of the criticism made within the programming sphere is not aimed at solving a problem, but rather exposing the obvious wrongness of the original product and its author(s).

I fully support the idea of discussing a problem, but the key term here is discussion. Sitting around talking about how terrible component Foo is because it's obvious to even the most casual observer that it has not a single redeeming characteristic is strictly demonizing.

For me, it's all about the community. Recognize that every program we criticize almost certainly had someone pour a ton of effort and thought into it, and use that knowledge to temper your criticism. Make it a learning experience for the original author, and strengthen your team/organization while you're at it instead of tearing down people in the name of improving the project.
I would go for Workout Instructor (domains are available expect .com). Using a dash they are all available. It seems that your service is quite rigid and spammy, and instructor is the word that comes to my mind when I think of those adjectives.

http://www.123-reg.co.uk/order?domain=www.workoutinstructor&...
http://www.123-reg.co.uk/order?domain=www.workout-instructor...
Dennis Ritchie > Steve Jobs == Nikola Tesla > Thomas Edison
I read the headline and immediately thought "but that's the only conference where they play real football!" <sigh>
This blurry image (http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg) from 1988 has some nostalgia. ($10 1988 dollars are about $18 2011 dollars.)

Compuserve, charging $11 per hour, had "more than 250,000 subscribers".

The Source, charging $8 per hour, was popular for its conferencing system "parti".

Delphi, charging $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following.

BIX, $9 per hour, grew from a magazine.

Notable quote:

> "This is the computer industry as it used to be: people sharing ideas and solutions without the greed and grit with associated with today's corporate driven, litigation-laced, industry" (this was written over 20 years ago).
On the other hand, having no sound until it starts means people might get startled when you actually start (or have them not realize their speakers are off).
> Mr. Andreessen’s office declined to comment for this article, but he, like other tech industry executives, have said they find Mr. Romney’s business background appealing.

I've never understood this. Running a country is significantly different from running a business. For instance, businesses can fire underperforming employees. A President, on the other hand, can't say "Louisiana, we spend $1.78 on you for every $1.00 we get back in taxes. It's just not working out. We need states to be more like New Jersey, where we only spend $0.61 per $1.00 we get back. Please pack you things, and the TSA will escort you to the Mexican or Canadian exit. We wish you the best of luck in finding citizenship in some other country, and we will be happy to write you a letter of recommendation".

The background I think would be most appealing for a President would be someone who in college double majored in history and something quantitative (a hard science, engineering, or economics at a school with a very mathematical economics program), went to law school, and worked in some field with international exposure.
Thank you Brian
I expected an extremely negative interpretation. My criticism is harsh because the failure here was unacceptable.

Look at the pull request they merged in. Any line added to a script which starts with "rm -rf $VARIABLE" cannot be scrutinized enough.

The first commit was created at: 2012-09-30T10:25:44-07:00.

The pull request was accepted at: 2012-09-30T10:59:08-07:00.

34 minutes to accept on a Sunday morning. I suspect that wasn't 34 minutes of review. I suspect it was closer to 34 seconds of review.

Unacceptable.
Heroics? How is carrying through on things that take long term effort anything like wasteful heroics?
Difference is between cost plus custom government contracts and fixed bid ones.

Think of it like the difference between the cost of developing a new product such as an iPhone before scaling it out (cost plus) and the cost of the delivery of the final product (a final complete iPhone from the city store).
The page doesn't seem to work right. Consider using noscript elements if your site is broken without javascript.
Good question. The main difference is the assumption of risk. Even though previous launches were often operated by private companies (and of course the launchers were built by the private sector) they did so on cost-plus contracts. SpaceX will be paid a fixed fee for delivering cargo.
Microsoft have always been awful at marketing. The design of Microsoft stores seems like them admitting so, and trying a "fake it 'til you don't have to" approach.
Odd. It works on my iPhone. May want to try it again.
A very short voice announcement every minute or so would be okay.